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Mike Chinoy: Standoff exposes U.S.-Chinese political, cultural schism
CNN Senior Asia Correspondent Mike Chinoy -- CNN's former bureau chief in Beijing, China -- has been following the Chinese-U.S. spy plane standoff and offered some insights. Q: What is China's perception of the United States? CHINOY: U.S. President Bush took office promising to change the American policy toward China from one of "strategic partnership" -- that was the Clinton administration's term -- to that of a "strategic competitor." Many of his associates have talked about China as a potential U.S. adversary and about the need to give weapons to Taiwan, which China claims is a renegade province. Beijing sees a lot of rhetoric coming out of Washington as hostile. So you put all of these ingredients together, you add to it the slow decision-making of a cumbersome Communist bureaucracy, and what you get is the situation we have now: a standoff in which China is taking its own good time. Beijing certainly doesn't want to appear to act simply because George Bush tells it to act. The Chinese are going to do it in their own way and hope to score diplomatic and political points domestically and internationally. Q: Is a U.S. apology what it's going to take to end all this? CHINOY: The diplomats are going to have to figure out a formula here. One of the things that's worrying analysts at this stage of the game is that you have President Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin each making public demands of the other. We don't have much indication that the diplomats who have to do the legwork to make an agreement are actually engaged in what anyone would call meaningful negotiations. The Chinese demand for an apology is clearly not something with which the U.S. is going to agree. It's standard Chinese practice, though, when people are put on trial in China -- invariably there's intense pressure on them to confess their crimes in order to receive lenient treatment. When I was based in Beijing -- and I was bureau chief for eight years there -- and we would get detained by police for taking pictures without authorization, they would always press us to admit that we were in the wrong before they would let us go or give us back our videotape. This is standard Chinese practice, standard Chinese psychology. One of the questions is whether China is really going to stick to this demand or whether all this is a kind of opening negotiating gambit -- and Beijing is calculating how much it can get (before letting) the air crew go. One of the other questions that analysts I have been speaking with have raised is whether China really understands the dynamic in the United States. Beijing may feel it can keep these American service people for some days, or a week or even more, without risking a devastating impact to U.S.-China relations. That may not work, because as media coverage in the states continues to build, more and more people will begin to call this a hostage situation. Even if China's leaders don't want to see a disastrous deterioration in Sino-American ties, that may be the consequence if their calculation is at variance with the U.S. response. RELATED STORIES:
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